Report: U.S. Pay-TV Market Loses 612,000 Subscribers in Q1 2017

PARIS—The U.S. pay-TV market didn’t have the best of starts to 2017 according to a new report from Dataxis. In a look at the first quarter of the year, Dataxis found that the total number of pay-TV subscribers in the U.S. fell to 100.3 million, a dip of 612,000 (0.61 percent) compared to Q4 2016.

Cable remained relatively stable, losing 0.17 percent of its subscribers capping its total at 58.4 million subscribers. DTH, however, lost 1.32 percent of its subscribers and now has 33.2 million subscribers. IPTV’s current total of 6.3 million subscribers is a decline of 3.1 percent from Q4 2016. In Q1 2017, the only service that was growing was OTT pay-TV services, with a new base of 2.4 million subscribers for a growth of 6 percent. OTT has doubled its share of the market since last year, now making up 2 percent of the market.

As far as what companies are leading the pay-TV market, Dataxis found that AT&T topped the market in Q1 2017 with a 25.3 percent share; Comcast followed at 22.7 percent and Charter placing in third with 17.1 percent.

While many fret over the future of pay TV in a world that increasingly is going digital, the overall global numbers of pay TV subscribers increased by 60 million from the third quarter of 2016 to the third quarter of 2017

The creation of the “skinny bundle” by pay TV operators, TV packages composed of selected channels targeted at a specific customer segment, is aimed at getting younger viewers to sign-up for pay TV rather than cut the cord.

While there is an expectation that virtual operators like SlingTV and DirecTV Now will continue to eat into traditional pay-TV services share of the market, The Diffusion Group projects that there will be less to go around by the time 2030 arrives.

While we’re certainly no longer in the days where people had a pair of rabbit ears on top of their TV sets, the use of antennas are making a little bit of a comeback according to a recent report from Parks Associates.